How To Know If Your Physical Therapist Will Actually Help You

How To Know If Your Physical Therapist Will Actually Help You

Today we are going to talk about the Evaluative Process. When you go to see a Physical Therapist if they grab the prescription from the doctor and they say, “okay the doctor said to do this the doctor said to do that all right let’s go do it.” You got to walk away because that is a horrible Physical Therapist, with no brain power whatsoever. Now I’m not saying doctors don’t know what they are talking about we shouldn’t listen to him but we did go to school for seven years as Physical Therapist so we should have some clue on how to do our own Evaluative Process okay and to find out what the problem is.

And the whole thing with the evaluation is, we are supposed to bring about the pain, we are supposed to bring about the functional limitations. We are supposed to put you through different functional activities in tasks or muscle tests to show what is deficient. What muscle group is weak, what muscle group is inflamed, what is causing you your pain because then it’s the only way that we know that okay that’s the tissue that’s inflamed, let’s go correct it and we can you know form a hypothesis of okay this is what is going on and figure out now how can we fix it and that’s where the treatment plan comes in. So the Evaluative Process should be first and foremost most importantly is questioning. Asking you where your pain came from, what makes it worse, what makes it better that is the most important part of my evaluation because that tells me where I should take my evaluation. If it’s “I fell down the stairs and my arm get twisted backwards” then am going to look and do more structural testing and if it’s something where, “I don’t know where the pain just kind of came about and it’s getting worse and worse” now we’re going to get into more functional testing and muscle testing to see what’s going on but all that is enclosed in that Evaluative Process. Muscle testing, Functional Testing, flexibility testing, watching you walk, Posture analysis, asking you to do different types of activities to see what is making it worse what is making it better.

All those things then palpation actually put your hands on you and moving around different tissue to see if that’s what’s causing your pain. All those things help us determine where the muscle imbalances lie, where the deficiencies is lying in your muscular skeletal system and then we can design a plan very easily on that first day to start getting you pain relief that day. Instead of sending you home and saying, okay come back next time we’ll start, we start that day with the treatment plan. All right and if you go to a place that kind of does the evaluation and they just send you home and it’s kind of a waste of time you should be getting pain relief that day. It’s not nice a send someone home when you know that they’re in pain. Like i say, “okay you lower back hurts because it’s caused by this and that come back next week it will start” that’s a joke, all right you got to start right then and there with the patient, they’re in pain that’s why they come in to see you and you got to get them better fast. And you should leave after your first day feeling some sort of relief. Something, if you’re not feeling after your first day you’re not leaving with some kind of relief in pain you might want to tell you Physical Therapist as well because then maybe he or she missed something and they need to re-evaluate it.

So that’s why I always tell my Physical Therapist never let the patient leave in pain on the first day make them and yourself understand that you’re on the right track and you can get this thing better all right. And you see incremental increases in function and decreases in pain as the treatments go on some level of improvement every single time.

So in a nutshell there’s the Evaluative Process for more information if you have any questions at all please give us a call our numbers are on our website for both our offices pklpt.com is our website, give us a call if you have any questions thank you.